What is a Competitive Analysis?

In SEO management, competitive analysis means identifying the major market players who compete with your content for organic traffic. The result of your competitive analysis can be seen in BrightEdge Share of Voice and Data Cube Score.

Demo Share of Voice For A Competitive Deep Dive

Discover how to do a competitive analysis - brightedgeWhy is it important to do a competitive analysis?

It is easy to view SEO and marketing as a competition between you and the SERP – focusing your efforts on raising rank so that you attract more attention and therefore more conversions. However, it is important to remember that your real competition is the other businesses in your industry. They are the ones fighting for those same top spots and the same customers.

With your competitors publishing new content, SERP is constantly changing. Finding which competitors outrank your content in this competitive, changing landscape is critical. Tracking them as a part of your marketing strategy will offer you valuable insights such as:

  • Key competitors you might have often overlooked
  • Content types or keywords that are helping competitors bring in customers that you are neglecting
  • SEO techniques that are helping them build their rank and authority that you are not taking advantage of, such as how your competitors content pages are structured
  • Areas that your competitors are falling short, where you can come in and dominate

How do you find competitors?

There are two main techniques that you can use to start identifying industry competitors.

  1. Use Google site operators. By using the related: “your website” command, you can ask Google which sites it views as being the most similar to your own website.
  2. Take advantage of the state-of-the-art BrightEdge technology. Use BrightEdge’s comparative analysis tool, powered by Share of Voice, to undercover previously unknown competitors and receive a detailed analysis of how the competitor ranks for particular keywords. You can also map out competitors for each segment of your business and do competitive benchmarking to see how you measure up at the beginning and end of your campaigns.

How do you write a competitive analysis?

Once you have a good idea of who your competitors are, you then need to take the steps necessary to analyze their campaigns, compare them to yours, and find areas where you need to improve or are in a position to outmaneuver the competitor and bring in more customers.

  1. Establish your current position compared to these competitors. See the areas where their site ranks higher and attracts more customers and compare it to your own to find points of weakness where you can improve.
  2. Monitor your overall Share of Voice to see how it compares to your competitors.
  3. Begin campaigns to fill in your gaps and improve your standings against the other sites.
  4. Measure your progress in terms of rankings and Share of Voice to see how well you have met your goals.

Competitors can offer you a considerable amount of insight into areas where your site and content strategy might be lacking and where you have the potential to start to dominate the SERPs. Taking the time to do competitor analysis can help you better position your web properties and bring in more customers than others in your industry.